Democratic Socialism Revisited

I’ve received a few private letters from old friends and colleagues about my last post, asking—in pained or incredulous tones—how I could have equated the conservative demagogues Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter with the socialist intellectuals Irving Howe and Michael Harrington. I didn’t, of course, but the fact that people of good will and sharp minds took such deep umbrage tells me that I need to revisit the post posthaste.

Harrington was the chairman of Democratic Socialists of America and the leader of the American socialist movement until his death, in 1989; in his books (most famously “The Other America”) and the personal example of his life, Harrington was a kind of secular saint. Howe, the great critic and editor of Dissent, was the closest I’ve come to having a mentor. He gave me my journalistic start in the pages of Dissent, for which I wrote dozens of pieces in the nineteen-nineties, and still on occasion today, as well as serving on its board. I also spent the better part of a decade as a member of D.S.A., editing its New England newsletter, organizing local meetings on the Canadian health-care system or Massachusetts tax reform, and playing third base on the Boston chapter’s softball team. (And, in the unlikely case that you want to know more, you can read about my experience in the socialist movement in Chapter thirteen of “Blood of the Liberals.”)

Howe and Harrington were great men, and their work outlives them. D.S.A. was a small, lively, politically marginal organization composed, for the most part, of decent people who, like me, had a quarrel with American capitalism. At the 1989 national conference, just after the Berlin Wall fell, Howe told his fellow democratic socialists that their organization, if not the ideas behind it, was dangerously far along the road to oblivion. I continued publishing newsletters and going to meetings for years after hearing him say so, but the truth of his remark stuck with me. Judged by membership and influence, D.S.A. was withering. As often happens in such situations, its intellectual energy flagged and in some cases—especially among the local members who made up the rank and file of the organization—was replaced by a defensive orthodoxy. In addition to writers, labor leaders, and politicians, D.S.A.’s chapters also attracted some activists who had the eccentric intensity and misplaced faith of true believers. The organization began to feel less and less like a home (unlike Dissent, where my loyalty and affection still lie), but because of the accumulation of ties and experiences it was years before I finally left.

In my post, I meant to compare this sense of belonging to an insular organization headed toward a political dead end with the current direction of the conservative movement. And that was all I meant to compare. It’s true that Harrington and Limbaugh were born in Missouri, and it’s also true that Howe was tall and Coulter is tall, but it’s a stretch to believe that I’d place the authors of “World of Our Fathers” and “Socialism: Past and Future” alongside the author of “How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must)” and the sweating buffoon at the microphone who is conservatism’s de facto leader.